6 Essential Code and Workflow Tips for your Email Campaigns

Ecommerce has become the easiest way to shop for many of us, and it is essential for businesses to make the most of communicating with their customers online. Emails are a great way not just to interact with existing clientele, but also to reach out to a potentially interested target audience.

Small glitches in your email campaign could result in a disinterested recipient or even worse, an email that is treated as spam, but there are easy ways to avoid this. Here are some easy tips that you could use for your code and workflow to achieve the best results from your email campaigns:

Welcome emails: When a recipient has newly signed up for your email series or newsletter, the first email is the one that has the power to make a lasting impression. It should convey your brand image and could also be an ideal opportunity to offer discounts or deals. Make sure that this email is not too long or overly descriptive, or the reader could lose interest in hearing further from your business. Discounts should also be well-thought out and offered only at the right opportunity, as consumers are very savvy at spotting a dud deal when they see it.

Email payload and loading time: We all love the visual appeal of text that is supplemented with images, but its important to remember that the more images you put in your email, the longer it would take to load. It’s no fun for the recipient to keep staring at the screen waiting to view an email, especially when it might be from a business or brand that they don’t even know well yet. Ensure that your emails have enough images to draw the attention of the reader, but watch out for overdoing it. You could also minimize the size of your images without losing the clarity, using some tools such as the ones mentioned in this campaignmonitor.com article.

Another aspect to watch out here is to check the visual appeal and performance of your emails on different devices, as smartphones and tablets are also now commonly used in ecommerce.

Templates and frameworks: Email campaigns usually require the creation of a large volume of emails from scratch, which might also contain repetitive content. In such a context, using templates for the emails would save a lot of time and effort for a business. This would also help in creating emails without always needing to figure out the nuances of every different email editor, as the template would take care of a lot of the formatting needs.

Opportunities to contact your target audience: Shopping cart abandonment is an important scenario that can be addressed using an email campaign. According to statistics mentioned in this Business2Community article, potential shoppers who abandoned their carts could spend up to 55 percent more if they come back to your site. The workflow for cart abandonment could include multiple follow-ups starting from a few hours after the user abandons the cart up to about a week after the occurrence. Customers who have already made a purchase on your site are also another potential audience for email engagement. Post-purchase follow-ups could include a request for reviews, invitation to your social media pages, and interesting and current offers and discounts.

HTML and CSS cleanup: Your HTML and CSS files are an integral part of your email campaigns, and developers could make things much easier by ensuring a clean and consistent coding mechanism in these areas. One good way of doing this is by peer reviews, so that they could be sure that their code is easy to read and understand before handing it over for a campaign. There are also projects and tools like HTML Tidy and CleanCSS that they could try out for this purpose.

Analytics: The pervasiveness of data has made analytics an essential part of any campaign. Most email marketing tools can provide you the required statistics to understand the effectiveness of your emails, which can help you optimize and fine-tune your strategy as you go along. Use this data efficiently to create the best value for you and your customers.

Improve the efficiency of your email campaigns and connect with your customer better with these easy tips. Do let us know if you found these helpful in planning the code and workflow in your email campaigns! We would love to hear from you in the comments below.